OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Privacy Rarely Considered: Exploring Considerations in the Adoption of Third-Party Services by Websites
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

Modern websites frequently use and embed third-party services to facilitate web development, connect to social media, or for monetization. This often introduces privacy issues as the inclusion of third-party services on a website can allow the third party to collect personal data about the website's visitors. While the prevalence and mechanisms of third-party web tracking have been widely studied, little is known about the decision processes that lead to websites using third-party functionality and whether efforts are being made to protect their visitors' privacy. We report results from an online survey with 395 participants involved in the creation and maintenance of websites. For ten common website functionalities we investigated if privacy has played a role in decisions about how the functionality is integrated, if specific efforts for privacy protection have been made during integration, and to what degree people are aware of data collection through third parties. We find that ease of integration drives third-party adoption but visitor privacy is considered if there are legal requirements or respective guidelines. Awareness of data collection and privacy risks is higher if the collection is directly associated with the purpose for which the third-party service is used.
Multi-Modal Learning for AU Detection Based on Multi-Head Fused Transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Multi-modal learning has been intensified in recent years, especially for applications in facial analysis and action unit detection whilst there still exist two main challenges in terms of 1) relevant feature learning for representation and 2) efficient fusion for multi-modalities. Recently, there are a number of works have shown the effectiveness in utilizing the attention mechanism for AU detection, however, most of them are binding the region of interest (ROI) with features but rarely apply attention between features of each AU. On the other hand, the transformer, which utilizes a more efficient self-attention mechanism, has been widely used in natural language processing and computer vision tasks but is not fully explored in AU detection tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end Multi-Head Fused Transformer (MFT) method for AU detection, which learns AU encoding features representation from different modalities by transformer encoder and fuses modalities by another fusion transformer module. Multi-head fusion attention is designed in the fusion transformer module for the effective fusion of multiple modalities. Our approach is evaluated on two public multi-modal AU databases, BP4D, and BP4D+, and the results are superior to the state-of-the-art algorithms and baseline models. We further analyze the performance of AU detection from different modalities.
Identity and Access Management Framework for Multi-tenant Resources in Hybrid Cloud Computing
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

While more organizations have been trying to move their infrastructure to the cloud in recent years, there have been significant challenges in how identities and access are managed in a hybrid cloud setting. This paper showcases a novel identity and access management framework for shared resources in a multi-tenant hybrid cloud environment. The paper demonstrates a method to implement the "mirror" identities of on-premise identities in the cloud. Following the best security practices, the framework ensures that only rightful users can use their mirror identities in the cloud. Furthermore, the paper also proposes a technique in scaling the framework to accommodate large-scale enterprises. The framework exhibited in the paper provides a comprehensive and scalable solution for enterprises to implement identity and access control in their hybrid cloud infrastructure. Although the paper focuses on implementing the framework in Google Cloud Platform, it can be easily applied to any major public cloud platform.
Comparing the expressiveness of the $π$-calculus and CCS
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2022
Year: 2022

This paper shows that the $π$-calculus with implicit matching is no more expressive than CCS$γ$, a variant of CCS in which the result of a synchronisation of two actions is itself an action subject to relabelling or restriction, rather than the silent action $τ$. This is done by exhibiting a compositional translation from the $π$-calculus with implicit matching to CCS$γ$ that is valid up to strong barbed bisimilarity. The full $π$-calculus can be similarly expressed in CCS$γ$ enriched with the triggering operation of Meije. I also show that these results cannot be recreated with CCS in the role of CCS$γ$, not even up to reduction equivalence, and not even for the asynchronous $π$-calculus without restriction or replication. Finally I observe that CCS cannot be encoded in the $π$-calculus.
Action Candidate Driven Clipped Double Q-learning for Discrete and Continuous Action Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Double Q-learning is a popular reinforcement learning algorithm in Markov decision process (MDP) problems. Clipped Double Q-learning, as an effective variant of Double Q-learning, employs the clipped double estimator to approximate the maximum expected action value. Due to the underestimation bias of the clipped double estimator, the performance of clipped Double Q-learning may be degraded in some stochastic environments. In this paper, in order to reduce the underestimation bias, we propose an action candidate-based clipped double estimator for Double Q-learning. Specifically, we first select a set of elite action candidates with high action values from one set of estimators. Then, among these candidates, we choose the highest valued action from the other set of estimators. Finally, we use the maximum value in the second set of estimators to clip the action value of the chosen action in the first set of estimators and the clipped value is used for approximating the maximum expected action value. Theoretically, the underestimation bias in our clipped Double Q-learning decays monotonically as the number of action candidates decreases. Moreover, the number of action candidates controls the trade-off between the overestimation and underestimation biases. In addition, we also extend our clipped Double Q-learning to continuous action tasks via approximating the elite continuous action candidates. We empirically verify that our algorithm can more accurately estimate the maximum expected action value on some toy environments and yield good performance on several benchmark problems.
Explainability in reinforcement learning: perspective and position
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been embedded into many aspects of people's daily lives and it has become normal for people to have AI make decisions for them. Reinforcement learning (RL) models increase the space of solvable problems with respect to other machine learning paradigms. Some of the most interesting applications are in situations with non-differentiable expected reward function, operating in unknown or underdefined environment, as well as for algorithmic discovery that surpasses performance of any teacher, whereby agent learns from experimental experience through simple feedback. The range of applications and their social impact is vast, just to name a few: genomics, game-playing (chess, Go, etc.), general optimization, financial investment, governmental policies, self-driving cars, recommendation systems, etc. It is therefore essential to improve the trust and transparency of RL-based systems through explanations. Most articles dealing with explainability in artificial intelligence provide methods that concern supervised learning and there are very few articles dealing with this in the area of RL. The reasons for this are the credit assignment problem, delayed rewards, and the inability to assume that data is independently and identically distributed (i.i.d.). This position paper attempts to give a systematic overview of existing methods in the explainable RL area and propose a novel unified taxonomy, building and expanding on the existing ones. The position section describes pragmatic aspects of how explainability can be observed. The gap between the parties receiving and generating the explanation is especially emphasized. To reduce the gap and achieve honesty and truthfulness of explanations, we set up three pillars: proactivity, risk attitudes, and epistemological constraints. To this end, we illustrate our proposal on simple variants of the shortest path problem.
Improved Differentially Private Euclidean Distance Approximation
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2022
Year: 2022

This work shows how to privately and more accurately estimate Euclidean distance between pairs of vectors. Input vectors $x$ and $y$ are mapped to differentially private sketches $x'$ and $y'$, from which one can estimate the distance between $x$ and $y$. Our estimator relies on the Sparser Johnson-Lindenstrauss constructions by Kane \& Nelson (Journal of the ACM 2014), which for any $0<α,β<1/2$ have optimal output dimension $k=Θ(α^{-2}\log(1/β))$ and sparsity $s=O(α^{-1}\log(1/β))$. We combine the constructions of Kane \& Nelson with either the Laplace or the Gaussian mechanism from the differential privacy literature, depending on the privacy parameters $\varepsilon$ and $δ$. We also suggest a differentially private version of Fast Johnson-Lindenstrauss Transform (FJLT) by Ailon \& Chazelle (SIAM Journal of Computing 2009) which offers a tradeoff in speed for variance for certain parameters. We answer an open question by Kenthapadi et al.~(Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality 2013) by analyzing the privacy and utility guarantees of an estimator for Euclidean distance, relying on Laplacian rather than Gaussian noise. We prove that the Laplace mechanism yields lower variance than the Gaussian mechanism whenever $δ<β^{O(1/α)}$. Thus, our work poses an improvement over the work of Kenthapadi et al.~by giving a more efficient estimator with lower variance for sufficiently small $δ$. Our sketch also achieves \emph{pure} differential privacy as a neat side-effect of the Laplace mechanism rather than the \emph{approximate} differential privacy guarantee of the Gaussian mechanism, which may not be sufficiently strong for some settings.
A Text-to-Speech Pipeline, Evaluation Methodology, and Initial Fine-Tuning Results for Child Speech Synthesis
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

Speech synthesis has come a long way as current text-to-speech (TTS) models can now generate natural human-sounding speech. However, most of the TTS research focuses on using adult speech data and there has been very limited work done on child speech synthesis. This study developed and validated a training pipeline for fine-tuning state-of-the-art (SOTA) neural TTS models using child speech datasets. This approach adopts a multi-speaker TTS retuning workflow to provide a transfer-learning pipeline. A publicly available child speech dataset was cleaned to provide a smaller subset of approximately 19 hours, which formed the basis of our fine-tuning experiments. Both subjective and objective evaluations were performed using a pretrained MOSNet for objective evaluation and a novel subjective framework for mean opinion score (MOS) evaluations. Subjective evaluations achieved the MOS of 3.95 for speech intelligibility, 3.89 for voice naturalness, and 3.96 for voice consistency. Objective evaluation using a pretrained MOSNet showed a strong correlation between real and synthetic child voices. Speaker similarity was also verified by calculating the cosine similarity between the embeddings of utterances. An automatic speech recognition (ASR) model is also used to provide a word error rate (WER) comparison between the real and synthetic child voices. The final trained TTS model was able to synthesize child-like speech from reference audio samples as short as 5 seconds.
Reinforcement-based frugal learning for satellite image change detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we introduce a novel interactive satellite image change detection algorithm based on active learning. The proposed approach is iterative and asks the user (oracle) questions about the targeted changes and according to the oracle's responses updates change detections. We consider a probabilistic framework which assigns to each unlabeled sample a relevance measure modeling how critical is that sample when training change detection functions. These relevance measures are obtained by minimizing an objective function mixing diversity, representativity and uncertainty. These criteria when combined allow exploring different data modes and also refining change detections. To further explore the potential of this objective function, we consider a reinforcement learning approach that finds the best combination of diversity, representativity and uncertainty, through active learning iterations, leading to better generalization as corroborated through experiments in interactive satellite image change detection.
The b-symbol weight distribution of irreducible cyclic codes and related consequences
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

The $b$-symbol read channel is motivated by the limitations of the reading process in high density data storage systems. The corresponding new metric is a generalization of the Hamming metric known as the $b$-symbol weight metric and has become an important object in coding theory. In this paper, the general $b$-symbol weight enumerator formula for irreducible cyclic codes is presented by using the Gaussian period and a new invariant $\#U(b,j,N_1)$. The related $b$-symbol weight hierarchies $\{d_1(\C),d_2(\C),\ldots,d_K(\C)\}$ ($K=\dim(\C)$) are given for some cases. The shortened codes which are optimal from some classes of irreducible cyclic codes are given, where the shorten set $\mathcal{T}$ is the complementary set of $b$-symbol support of some codeword with the minimal $b$-symbol weight.
Analysis of Disfluencies for automatic detection of Mild Cognitive Impartment: a deep learning approach
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

The so-called Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) or cognitive loss appears in a previous stage before Alzheimer's Disease (AD), but it does not seem sufficiently severe to interfere in independent abilities of daily life, so it usually does not receive an appropriate diagnosis. Its detection is a challenging issue to be addressed by medical specialists. This work presents a novel proposal based on automatic analysis of speech and disfluencies aimed at supporting MCI diagnosis. The approach includes deep learning by means of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and non-linear multifeature modelling. Moreover, to select the most relevant features non-parametric Mann-Whitney U-testt and Support Vector Machine Attribute (SVM) evaluation are used.
Learning Relation-Specific Representations for Few-shot Knowledge Graph Completion
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Recent years have witnessed increasing interest in few-shot knowledge graph completion (FKGC), which aims to infer unseen query triples for a few-shot relation using a few reference triples about the relation. The primary focus of existing FKGC methods lies in learning relation representations that can reflect the common information shared by the query and reference triples. To this end, these methods learn entity-pair representations from the direct neighbors of head and tail entities, and then aggregate the representations of reference entity pairs. However, the entity-pair representations learned only from direct neighbors may have low expressiveness when the involved entities have sparse direct neighbors or share a common local neighborhood with other entities. Moreover, merely modeling the semantic information of head and tail entities is insufficient to accurately infer their relational information especially when they have multiple relations. To address these issues, we propose a Relation-Specific Context Learning (RSCL) framework, which exploits graph contexts of triples to learn global and local relation-specific representations for few-shot relations. Specifically, we first extract graph contexts for each triple, which can provide long-term entity-relation dependencies. To encode the extracted graph contexts, we then present a hierarchical attention network to capture contextualized information of triples and highlight valuable local neighborhood information of entities. Finally, we design a hybrid attention aggregator to evaluate the likelihood of the query triples at the global and local levels. Experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate that RSCL outperforms state-of-the-art FKGC methods.
Weakly-Supervised Salient Object Detection Using Point Supervision
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Current state-of-the-art saliency detection models rely heavily on large datasets of accurate pixel-wise annotations, but manually labeling pixels is time-consuming and labor-intensive. There are some weakly supervised methods developed for alleviating the problem, such as image label, bounding box label, and scribble label, while point label still has not been explored in this field. In this paper, we propose a novel weakly-supervised salient object detection method using point supervision. To infer the saliency map, we first design an adaptive masked flood filling algorithm to generate pseudo labels. Then we develop a transformer-based point-supervised saliency detection model to produce the first round of saliency maps. However, due to the sparseness of the label, the weakly supervised model tends to degenerate into a general foreground detection model. To address this issue, we propose a Non-Salient Suppression (NSS) method to optimize the erroneous saliency maps generated in the first round and leverage them for the second round of training. Moreover, we build a new point-supervised dataset (P-DUTS) by relabeling the DUTS dataset. In P-DUTS, there is only one labeled point for each salient object. Comprehensive experiments on five largest benchmark datasets demonstrate our method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods trained with the stronger supervision and even surpass several fully supervised state-of-the-art models. The code is available at: https://github.com/shuyonggao/PSOD.
A Decentralised Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Approach for the Same-Day Delivery Problem
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2022
Year: 2022

Same-Day Delivery services are becoming increasingly popular in recent years. These have been usually modelled by previous studies as a certain class of Dynamic Vehicle Routing Problem (DVRP) where goods must be delivered from a depot to a set of customers in the same day that the orders were placed. Adaptive exact solution methods for DVRPs can become intractable even for small problem instances. In this paper, we formulate the SDDP as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and solve it using a parameter-sharing Deep Q-Network, which corresponds to a decentralised Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) approach. For this, we create a multi-agent grid-based SDD environment, consisting of multiple vehicles, a central depot and dynamic order generation. In addition, we introduce zone-specific order generation and reward probabilities. We compare the performance of our proposed MARL approach against a Mixed Inter Programming (MIP) solution. Results show that our proposed MARL framework performs on par with MIP-based policy when the number of orders is relatively low. For problem instances with higher order arrival rates, computational results show that the MARL approach underperforms the MIP by up to 30%. The performance gap between both methods becomes smaller when zone-specific parameters are employed. The gap is reduced from 30% to 3% for a 5x5 grid scenario with 30 orders. Execution time results indicate that the MARL approach is, on average, 65 times faster than the MIP-based policy, and therefore may be more advantageous for real-time control, at least for small-sized instances.
Twin Weisfeiler-Lehman: High Expressive GNNs for Graph Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

The expressive power of message passing GNNs is upper-bounded by Weisfeiler-Lehman (WL) test. To achieve high expressive GNNs beyond WL test, we propose a novel graph isomorphism test method, namely Twin-WL, which simultaneously passes node labels and node identities rather than only passes node label as WL. The identity-passing mechanism encodes complete structure information of rooted subgraph, and thus Twin-WL can offer extra power beyond WL at distinguishing graph structures. Based on Twin-WL, we implement two Twin-GNNs for graph classification via defining readout function over rooted subgraph: one simply readouts the size of rooted subgraph and the other readouts rich structure information of subgraph following a GNN-style. We prove that the two Twin-GNNs both have higher expressive power than traditional message passing GNNs. Experiments also demonstrate the Twin-GNNs significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods at the task of graph classification.
Continuous Detection, Rapidly React: Unseen Rumors Detection based on Continual Prompt-Tuning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Since open social platforms allow for a large and continuous flow of unverified information, rumors can emerge unexpectedly and spread quickly. However, existing rumor detection (RD) models often assume the same training and testing distributions and can not cope with the continuously changing social network environment. This paper proposed a Continual Prompt-Tuning RD (CPT-RD) framework, which avoids catastrophic forgetting (CF) of upstream tasks during sequential task learning and enables bidirectional knowledge transfer between domain tasks. Specifically, we propose the following strategies: (a) Our design explicitly decouples shared and domain-specific knowledge, thus reducing the interference among different domains during optimization; (b) Several technologies aim to transfer knowledge of upstream tasks to deal with emergencies; (c) A task-conditioned prompt-wise hypernetwork (TPHNet) is used to consolidate past domains. In addition, CPT-RD avoids CF without the necessity of a rehearsal buffer.
Explainable Misinformation Detection Across Multiple Social Media Platforms
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

In this work, the integration of two machine learning approaches, namely domain adaptation and explainable AI, is proposed to address these two issues of generalized detection and explainability. Firstly the Domain Adversarial Neural Network (DANN) develops a generalized misinformation detector across multiple social media platforms DANN is employed to generate the classification results for test domains with relevant but unseen data. The DANN-based model, a traditional black-box model, cannot justify its outcome, i.e., the labels for the target domain. Hence a Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME) explainable AI model is applied to explain the outcome of the DANN mode. To demonstrate these two approaches and their integration for effective explainable generalized detection, COVID-19 misinformation is considered a case study. We experimented with two datasets, namely CoAID and MiSoVac, and compared results with and without DANN implementation. DANN significantly improves the accuracy measure F1 classification score and increases the accuracy and AUC performance. The results obtained show that the proposed framework performs well in the case of domain shift and can learn domain-invariant features while explaining the target labels with LIME implementation enabling trustworthy information processing and extraction to combat misinformation effectively.